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Wednesday, 11 December 2013

Vincent Calcagno, an ecologist at the French Institute for Agricultural Research in Sophia-Antipolis, and his colleagues tracked the submission histories of 80,748 scientific articles published among 923 bioscience journals between 2006 and 2008, based on information provided by the papers’ authors for 18 biological/ecological topics. They then analysed the data in the paper:

the number of times a journal was first chosen for submission increases with impact factor

about 75% of published articles
were submitted first to the journal that would publish them, indicating that many academics do no resubmit papers that are rejected

the impact factor of the publishing journal was generally less the one previously attempted

journals
with low impact factors would more often receive
and publish manuscripts previously rejected by higher-impact journals

even Nature and Science are far from publishing 100% of first-intents because each often publishes manuscripts rejected by the other

Others more interesting findings included:

high-impact journals publish more that are resubmitted to them from
another journal

none of the journals was just recycling
manuscripts rejected from other journals

low-impact journals are more specialized,
with lower
rejection rates in it receiving proportionally fewer resubmissions
from
their neighbours

resubmissions were significantly more cited than first-intents published the same year in the same journal and these were more cited irrespective of their going up or down in impact factor as a result of resubmission

resubmissions occurring between two journals from the same
journal community were significantly more cited than those between two different communities

My interpretation of this is as follows. The higher citation from resubmitted papers may partly just a
trickle down effect from Nature/Science/Cell Biology to second tier
high-impact journals. Authors often learn from the submission process and either improve their papers or have faith in them and resubmit them elsewhere (as indicated by the higher citations from these papers). Maybe authors have a good feel for their paper's worth and tend to submit to an appropriate journal, with the authors of not so interesting/good papers being more reluctant to resubmit. It does reinforce the evidence for an oligopoly of the top journals (science, nature) as bemoaned by a recent Nobel prize winner (see my post here).

Alongside very respectable open-access journals, who are committed to keeping published research open-access, are a world of journals who are little more than a vanity press, publishing anything in return for cash. The journal "Science" has done an investigation, and found that many of these journals accepted a spoof paper they concocted. Of course, Science, has a vested interest in stressing the virtues of the old "pay wall" model of publication, but there is no doubt that many unscrupulous "open access" journals exist (along side older "conferences" with basically the same purpose).

This allows anyone to request a place at the Lorentz workshop. For those who have already expressed an interest rest assured their registration will be accepted, for others that are interested and request registration we will probably make a decision sometime by the end of November 2013 (on those making requests up to that point). We are committed to encourage women and young researchers to take up any extra places, and those who are developing or have developed a relevant simulation.

Tuesday, 1 October 2013

A workshop at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest,Hungary, May, 22-23 2014This
workshop will bring together two communities to join forces in research
on innovation policy modelling as it intersects the areas of complexity
science and social simulation.Broadly
speaking it aims to show how complexity models and simulation such as
the Simulating Knowledge dynamics in Innovation Networks (SKIN) model
can be used to improve and inform the innovation policy making process.

The workshop will focus on three key overlapping themes:

Modelling, understanding and managing innovation policy using the SKIN model

Large scale data and scalability for research and innovation policy modelling

SKIN between complexity science and social science: mechanisms and components

There are two scholarships available for ESSA members who are still PhD
students to give them financial support for them to attend the Lorentz
workshop on "Simulating the Social Processes of Science", that will
occur 7-11 April 2014 at the Lorentz Centre in Leiden, the Netherlands.

This would cover:

6 nights hotel: €77 x 6 = €462

5 days lunch: €11 x 5 = €55

€300 (max) travel costs

Total per student = €817

To apply, please send an explanation of why you are worthy to receive this and a short CV to Bruce Edmonds <bruce@edmonds.name> by 24th November 2013.

Thursday, 26 September 2013

PostDoc position (3 years, starting 1st November 2013 or as soon as possible thereafter)

The PostDoc position is funded by the Swiss Sinergia Grant “Crowdsourced conceptualization of complex
scientific knowledge and discovery of discoveries”. The goal of this project is to make a significant step towards
the semi-­‐automated conceptualization of scientific knowledge and its large scale analysis. This includes
developing a participatory platform for knowledge elicitation as well as resolving a number of deep theoretical
problems that have to be tackled prior to designing such a system. The results of these theoretical investigations
will be implemented in the participatory platform, in order to increase its usability and data-­‐harvesting power
and at the same time providing a validation framework for tuning the methods and algorithms. The project will
be based on the ScienceWISE system (http://sciencewise.info), already used by many scientists for semantically
importing, storing and searching scientific data, and will develop it further.

Within the project, the specific contribution of the PostDoc position funded in Leiden will be the
development and validation of algorithms for “networks of networks” based on scientific information (including
the proper definition of their topological properties; multi-­‐level community detection and hierarchical
clustering; coarse-­‐graining; studying the time evolution of multi-­‐networks, etc.). The ScienceWISE platform will
provide significant opportunity and user feedback for real-­‐time validation of such methods.

As all postdoctoral positions in the Netherlands, the position is a regular employment contract and is
renewed for 2 years after the first one, for a total of 3 years. Interested candidates should send an email with
their CV and motivation to Alexey Boyarsky (boyarsky@lorentz.leidenuniv.nl) as soon as possible.

Abstract

The hypothesis of a Hierarchy of the Sciences, first formulated in the 19th
century, predicts that, moving from simple and general phenomena (e.g.
particle dynamics) to complex and particular (e.g. human behaviour),
researchers lose ability to reach theoretical and methodological
consensus. This hypothesis places each field of research along a
continuum of complexity and “softness”, with profound implications for
our understanding of scientific knowledge. Today, however, the idea is
still unproven and philosophically overlooked, too often confused with
simplistic dichotomies that contrast natural and social sciences, or
science and the humanities. Empirical tests of the hypothesis have
usually compared few fields and this, combined with other limitations,
makes their results contradictory and inconclusive. We verified whether
discipline characteristics reflect a hierarchy, a dichotomy or neither,
by sampling nearly 29,000 papers published contemporaneously in 12
disciplines and measuring a set of parameters hypothesised to reflect
theoretical and methodological consensus. The biological sciences had in
most cases intermediate values between the physical and the social,
with bio-molecular disciplines appearing harder than zoology, botany or
ecology. In multivariable analyses, most of these parameters were
independent predictors of the hierarchy, even when mathematics and the
humanities were included. These results support a “gradualist” view of
scientific knowledge, suggesting that the Hierarchy of the Sciences
provides the best rational framework to understand disciplines'
diversity. A deeper grasp of the relationship between subject matter's
complexity and consensus could have profound implications for how we
interpret, publish, popularize and administer scientific research.

Saturday, 27 April 2013

New article on peer review in Nature Scientific Reports: "How important tasks are performed: peer review" by T. Hartonen and M.J. Alaya

Abstract

The advancement of various fields of science depends on the actions of
individual scientists via the peer review process. The referees' work patterns
and stochastic nature of decision making both relate to the particular features
of refereeing and to the universal aspects of human behavior. Here, we show that
the time a referee takes to write a report on a scientific manuscript depends on
the final verdict. The data is compared to a model, where the review takes place
in an ongoing competition of completing an important composite task with a large
number of concurrent ones - a Deadline -effect. In peer review human decision
making and task completion combine both long-range predictability and stochastic
variation due to a large degree of ever-changing external “friction”. http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130417/srep01679/full/srep01679.html?WT.ec_id=SREP-20130423

Friday, 26 April 2013

The following COST action has been launched today, on developing new maps (or ways of navigating knowledge). It will be organising workshops, conferences, visits and funding costs of eligible participants to attend these. In particular it will fund some of the costs of people attending the Lorentz Workshop on "Simulating the Social Processes of Science", to be held 7-11 April 2013.

Anyone from any COST countries can apply to this network project to be funded to attend such, or even run such an event.

There is no escape from the expansion of information, so
that structuring and locating meaningful knowledge becomes ever more
difficult. This project will tackle this urgent problem using the unique
networking and capacity-building features provided by the COST
framework. For the first time, a platform will be created where
information professionals, sociologists, physicists, digital humanities
scholars and computer scientists collaborate on problems of data mining
and data curation in collections. The main objective is advancing the
analysis of large knowledge spaces and systems that organize and order
them. The combination of insights from complexity theory and knowledge
organization will improve our understanding of the collective,
self-organized nature of human knowledge production and will support the
development of new principles and methods of data representation,
processing, and archiving. To this end, the knowledge organization in
web-based information spaces such as Wikipedia as well as collections
from libraries, archives, and museums will be studied. KnowEscape aims
to create interactive knowledge maps. Their end users could be
scientists working between disciplines and seeking mutual understanding;
science policy makers designing funding frameworks; cultural heritage
institutions aiming at better access to their collections; and students
seeking a first orientation in academia.

Public agencies like the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the
National Institutes of Health (NIH) award tens of billions of dollars in annual
science funding. How can this money be distributed as efficiently as possible
to best promote scientific innovation and productivity? The present system
relies primarily on peer review of project proposals. In 2010 alone, NSF
convened more than 15,000 scientists to review 55,542 proposals. Although
considered the scientific gold standard, peer review requires significant
overhead costs, and may be subject to biases, inconsistencies, and oversights.
We investigate a class of funding models in which all participants receive an
equal portion of yearly funding, but are then required to anonymously donate a
fraction of their funding to peers. The funding thus flows from one participant
to the next, each acting as if he or she were a funding agency themselves. Here
we show through a simulation conducted over large-scale citation data (37M
articles, 770M citations) that such a distributed system for science may yield
funding patterns similar to existing NIH and NSF distributions, but may do so
at much lower overhead while exhibiting a range of other desirable features.
Self-correcting mechanisms in scientific peer evaluation can yield an efficient
and fair distribution of funding. The proposed model can be applied in many
situations in which top-down or bottom-up allocation of public resources is
either impractical or undesirable, e.g. public investments, distribution
chains, and shared resource management.

Coauthorship and citation in scientific publishing

A large number of published studies have examined the properties of either
networks of citation among scientific papers or networks of coauthorship among
scientists. Here, using an extensive data set covering more than a century of
physics papers published in the Physical Review, we study a hybrid
coauthorship/citation network that combines the two, which we analyze to gain
insight into the correlations and interactions between authorship and citation.
Among other things, we investigate the extent to which individuals tend to cite
themselves or their collaborators more than others, the extent to which they
cite themselves or their collaborators more quickly after publication, and the
extent to which they tend to return the favor of a citation from another
scientist.

Tuesday, 9 April 2013

has
been approved by NIAS and the Lorentz Center.
Congratulations! We have been able to schedule the workshop for the
period 7 – 11 April 2014at the venue Lorentz Center@Oort in Leiden in the Netherlands.

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of referee behaviour on the quality
and efficiency of peer review. We focused on the importance of
reciprocity motives in ensuring cooperation between all involved
parties. We modelled peer review as a process based on knowledge
asymmetries and subject to evaluation bias. We built various simulation
scenarios in which we tested different interaction conditions and author
and referee behaviour. We found that reciprocity cannot always have per
se a positive effect on the quality of peer review, as it may tend to
increase evaluation bias. It can have a positive effect only when
reciprocity motives are inspired by disinterested standards of fairness

This is a blog (now) associated with the European Social Simulation Assocation SIG on "Simulating the Social Processes of Science". For all queries about the SIG, or items to post here please contact Bruce Edmonds "bruce at edmonds dot name". Thanks